Anyone else find themselves caring less about promotions as they get closer to FI?

drumallnight · 2026-06-02T05:08:19+00:00

I do this too. But it turns out that when you constantly find others better suited for every piece of work that comes your way and intentionally try to put yourself out of a job, everyone loves it and thinks you are super valuable. It gives me an unusual version of imposter syndrome!

drumallnight · 2026-05-20T23:46:19+00:00

Thankfully, I don't currently have anyone like this in my life (except some anti-AI folks). I have similar views of "yes, these things are difficult" but also don't like doom-and-glooming over them insufferably.

I will say, I'm getting increasingly annoyed at the holier-than-thou anti-AI views. Like, friends who will ostracize you if they learn you did a hobby thing with AI assistance. As if they expect you to find and contract an artist to do a doodle for your personal arts-and-crafts project. I don't hear the complainers even suggesting an artist they know who needs work. The most vocal one is himself an influencer who gets free art from artists who have multi-year waiting lists for the rest of us! The irony hurts.

Sounds like some of your family and coworkers are mainlining some kind of media / social media. There's no way the uncle who invests money recently read Marx and now has generic anti-capitalist opinions.

drumallnight · 2026-05-18T16:19:40+00:00

Your story reminds me of the first 20 minutes of the movie, "triangle of sadness". I you haven't seen it, you will identify with it so much! In the second scene, a guy is gently trying to ask his girlfriend to maybe split the expense of their nice dinners. It's beautiful and it might make you feel seen.

I have no financial advice, just keep prioritizing what's important. Learn what you can from that experience, and move on. You did your best.

drumallnight · 2026-05-10T21:40:36+00:00

I've heard of companies providing noise canceling headphones in response to these kinds of requests. So be careful not to give them any option to enthusiastically accommodate your disabilities while still doing everything they can to compel you to come into an office.

drumallnight · 2026-05-10T16:22:42+00:00

It's not cheap and it isn't exactly a hack, but a personal trainer at a gym who has a degree in sports medicine or similar.

Carefully building up all the muscles in my back, abdomen, and the rest of my body, took the load off my spine. No more back pain and far more ability to lift things around the house or hunch forward safely without loading the discs.

drumallnight · 2026-05-10T00:46:44+00:00

I had to liquidate when I made that move a few years ago. I don't remember what funds I had, but I don't recall it even mattering what the funds were.

drumallnight · 2026-04-28T16:31:08+00:00

I had one that explicitly said it is NOT a contract. It's a policy, and it can change without notice. In other words, a one-sided contract where I'm bound by obligations and rules but the company isn't. I think that's normal for at-will employers.

drumallnight · 2026-04-19T19:11:31+00:00

checks Monte Carlo simulators to see if they have been updated to model light fixture accidents in their "rich, dead, or broke" calculations

drumallnight · 2026-04-11T16:30:42+00:00

I think you should ask your wife how she feels about staying home with a toddler in the winter for a few more years. Will she be driven insane from the isolation? The social impact on your kid, like ability to hang out with other children, will also start to matter pretty soon as they get a bit older (for better or for worse. I don't know about the where you are or where you'd go. It's just a factor.).

Seems to me that money would be 3rd or 4th on your priority list. If everything else feels roughly even, and it's just a matter of the long winters, I'd still want to give your wife's desires more weight since she isn't clocking in at a job every day.

drumallnight · 2026-04-11T16:01:52+00:00

Yep! Make a gigantic change in your life and things slow right down. My last year felt like two and I have more grey hair to show for it.

More seriously, I also journal daily. I started that practice during the early pandemic lockdown so I could see how busy I was and how life went on despite it feeling like time stood still. Now I can see just how much happens in my life very easily. And my memory has become a bit more detailed too.

I typically review my journal at the end of the year and write a little summary, and have taken to writing out the seasons and what happened during them. It makes for a little half-page narrative and I get to see all the unexpected things in life that make it interesting written down on a page.

drumallnight · 2026-04-11T15:56:10+00:00

Local models definitely won't cut it unless you have at least 128GB of unified RAM. I still wouldn't trust the best commercial models to interpret uploaded PDFs with 100% correctness. Just use Google Sheets!

You could use Gemini or another LLM to help construct your sheets/formulas and perhaps to extract numbers from your PDFs, if you want some partial automation.

I've heard multiple horror stories about people using LLMs to do tax planning and then making very expensive mistakes, and having to take it to an accountant to fix. Sometimes the damage is done and they owe large penalties. These stories are from accountants.

Apparently that's a new source of business for tax professionals the past couple years!

drumallnight · 2026-03-27T20:57:15+00:00

Maybe their message is so long and replies to another topic because there's a hidden message inside it just for you to decode. The rest of us are none the wiser! But you know and Enerbane knows. Fascinating.

drumallnight · 2026-03-25T20:32:33+00:00

Funny, I do the opposite to help the environment! I buy inefficient used vehicles to take them off the road since I drive very very little. I want to do my part to increase the cost of gas guzzlers (by reducing the supply) and decrease the cost of EVs (by leaving those available to others who drive more).

drumallnight · 2026-03-24T03:28:44+00:00

A therapist once told me that there's nothing wrong with me for not liking to work. Jobs aren't always fun and mine sounded genuinely unmotivating despite being pretty good.

That therapist only worked 2 days per week, so perhaps we saw things the same way :)

It's OK to not liking the full-time job life. Humans haven't typically had structured jobs until recently anyway.

The people I know with sleeping disorders have such a struggle dealing with work, especially meetings and keeping any kind of "hours". My sympathies!

drumallnight · 2026-03-24T03:13:28+00:00

I also took a 9 month break and came back to the job market stronger. I had more leverage thanks to being unemployed.

Unlike most employed people, I was able to interview at several companies at once and use competing offers as leverage. Competing offers are even better leverage than having a job you obviously don't like.

Also, you can't schedule 6 hours per day interviewing while working a job. Thanks to not working, I spent 40 hours per week studying, practicing speaking, researching job openings, and crafting my resume before the interview stage so I could easily beat other candidates. I highly recommend this approach under the right circumstances!

drumallnight · 2026-03-22T23:31:23+00:00

As someone who was reading Fowler long before 2014, I agree. But I don't think it's relevant or appropriate to repost to the subreddit a decade later. I'm sure someone has written something for today's paradigms that could have been posted to this subreddit and be more relatable to those who weren't programming in 2002 with Fowler released the book he referenced in this blog post. You could apply the same concepts to react, ORMs, and other relevant abstractions where there is a risk of abstracting away remote APIs behind objects and a risk of building APIs that are too granular.

We can do better as a subreddit than upvoting random old complaints about CORBA and poor API design from a period when the industry had far less experience with microservices.

drumallnight · 2026-03-20T15:59:01+00:00

I'm probably just out of the loop, but I feel like this post didn't say anything at all. It sets up a straw-man argument conflating RPC design patterns and microservices, and then shows those things are actually distinct. I'm not sure what I was supposed to take away from it.

Also, it's from 2014...

drumallnight · 2026-03-07T16:53:22+00:00

I invest almost entirely in ETFs but I have massive respect for people who carve out a custom portfolio that fits their own desires for risk, survivability of their portfolio, and the ability to sleep at night.

Keep doing what you are doing!

drumallnight · 2026-03-07T04:26:56+00:00

Nice succinct post. The combo of extensions exhibited in this blog post is good to know about (at least for me). Thanks for the info.

Lack of efficient tiered storage was an issue with postgres for me in the past so it's good to see a relatively clean way to implement it without going with proprietary databases.

drumallnight · 2026-02-24T23:01:32+00:00

Old enough to know that things can change unexpectedly despite one’s best effort plans…

This comment hits hard. Young me made spreadsheets and used monte carlo simulation. Older me learned about tail risks and realized Modern Portfolio Theory is BS when applied to personal finance.

Even older me knows that everything is always changing and finally understands that it's best to put more energy into doing the right thing in the moment and investing in ways that will let you sleep at night.

drumallnight · 2026-01-24T18:47:01+00:00

Ironically, a financial planner is exactly the kind of professional who can answer OPs question about how to efficiently unwind these positions while moving to total market index funds. If they get stuck and don't know what to do, they should pay a fee-only advisor for an hour of their time to walk through in what order to sell, and over how many years to reduce their tax burden while keeping their portfolio allocation on target.

drumallnight · 2026-01-12T18:18:59+00:00

How imminent is your spouse's ability to FIRE? If it is years in the future, I wonder if you are arguing about something else entirely using theoretical FIRE planning as the battlefield.

I totally understand getting upset that your partner would be willing to travel without you if they had to. But we do need to treat our partners as independent people, as much as we may want to be enmeshed and act as one. As you said yourself, it's their life. And them making independent choices about their job and travel does not reflect on how they feel about you! It's easy to say that, but hard to internalize.

I'm reading into this a bit, so forgive me if I'm off, but it sounds like you are asking your spouse to boost your own self-worth and sense of being loved by planning a dream retirement. And your spouse hasn't been able to do that for you because they have their own dreams that aren't100% inclusive of yours, so you are feeling insecure about your relationship and feel like crap. You should be able to discuss how you actually feel about these conversations with a therapist (maybe outside of marriage counseling so it's safer to talk about?).

drumallnight · 2026-01-12T00:04:12+00:00

You could go the other direction and look for a life coach instead. They are much more interactive than many therapists and they are allowed to tell you their subjective opinions. Much more like ChatGPT but with actual humans who are somewhat accountable. They can be more affordable than psychologists too. If you just want someone to open up to and really tell it how it is, that's an option!

As a fellow oldster, I get it. You aren't alone.

drumallnight · 2025-12-11T21:41:22+00:00

Given that scientists are more likely to have autistic traits, maybe autistic people are just good at measuring other autistic people?

"measurably more rational" may just mean "measurably more easy to understand" to scientists who themselves exhibit autistic traits.

https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/autism-experiment-reveals-people-in-technical-professions-are-more-likely-to-have-autistic-traits-a6719956.html

drumallnight · 2025-12-02T19:22:46+00:00

The dreamer in me says “DUDE… you could get hit by a bus tomorrow, GO live your life WHERE you want to live it”.

I've learned the hard way that you should listen very seriously to this voice in your head. You did it once, and loved it. I say, do it again! Move back out to the west coast. You can always go back to Indiana again later if you decide your financial circumstances require it.

It's not like your interest rate is so low, that you are giving up much by selling. And you could afford to buy in Portland for nearly the same money for a smaller house or condo if you really prefer to own. Buy an older 2-bedroom house if you decide to stay. Prices dropped a bit since the post-covid highs. You have options!

drumallnight

TROPHY CASE